Home School Life Journal

Home School Life Journal ........... painting by Katie Bergenholtz

"Let us strive to make each moment beautiful."

Saint Francis DeSales

Spy Birthday Party

This is a birthday party I did a couple of years ago for my spy-loving son. The party had only a little preparation, not many materials, but was a lot of fun.Your Mission: A bomb is set to go off destroying Your Town and the surrounding areas. Your mission is to find the bomb, deactivate it and capture the enemy who set it. You will get help by clues from headquarters. "Your first clue has been put into code.

Use the birthday cake as your decoder."

Decoded message read:

"Go to the living room and open your presents for the next clue."This decoder cake is just like the old decoder rings that used to come in Cracker Jack boxes and Gumball machines. You will need two sets of candy letters made to decorate cakes. We frosted the cake with white icing, put the letters around the edge in random order. (We actually spelled "Happy Birthday, Sam" in it as well.) Put the second set of letters, in a smaller circle just inside the other one, making sure that all the letters match up. I drew lines seperating the letters down to the middle in a matching color.

I left messages in two of his gifts; a lazer tag set and a set of walkie-talkies.

"Take this Laser Tag out of its box as you will need it to stun the enemy. The Yellow Team needs to go to the front porch and find the combination for a combination lock."

Ahead of time, I had hid a briefcase with a lock in it in the backyard and set it to a certain code. I wrote this same code in sidewalk chalk on our front porch in a hidden spot.

"Open these Walkie Talkies and use them to send and receive information. The Red Team needs to go to the backyard and find a locked briefcase and wait for the Yellow Team to relay you the combination that opens the lock over the walkie talkie." Found in the briefcase:

"You must deactivate the bomb by cutting the red wire, but first you must practice bomb handling."Agents practice bomb handling by playing "hot potato" by handing a kitchen timer off to each other without it ringing.Once this has been played a few times, they were rewarded with this message:

"Now you must go down the zip-line to the secret hideout. That is where the enemy has planted the bomb. Be careful, the zip-line is guarded by the enemy who will use a stun gun. You can use your stun gun to protect yourself."So they took turns riding down the zipline while being covered by their teammates with the lazer guns. Meanwhile the "enemy" had the other lazer gun and tried to hit the the guests on the zipline or their guards. "Once you are at the hideout, you must carefully go through the laser beams to get to the bomb. Good luck, agents!"The lazer beams were thin pieces of string and streamers. They needed to get through without touching them with any part of their body. If they did, we just let the next person give it a try.

Once in the playhouse, they were greeted with this, which was a timer set to go off 45 minutes into the party. They had to cut the red wire with the pair of wire cutters before it was to go off.

"After the bomb is deactivated, you must apprehend the enemy. Be careful, she is armed."

They had a store of squirt guns in the playhouse to use to defend themselves.The "enemy" was big sister with a huge squirt gun.